‘You don’t get used to being in prison in a single day,’ says Echols, ‘and you don’t get used to being out of prison in a single day.’ Damien Echols talks to the Guardian about how he survived 18 years on death row.

And thereby hangs a question: after an author has passed through the gates and entered the Elysian pastures of canonisation, is there any point in a critic rushing in and trying to drag him back out again? Once an author is a classic, can that status be revoked?On denouncing the classics.